Sunday, 11 March 2018

The Financial Times has a
fascinating article called When Islam met the Enlightenment (28
February, 2018) bout Europe's intellectual engagement with the Muslim
world in the seventeenth century, including an analysis of some of the European literature prodused at the time on the subject:

"If their medieval progenitors were generally motivated by a desire to prove
Islam a profane heresy from the east, this new and diverse Republic of Arabic
letters adopted a cooler approach. They wrote in a less polemical key and
recognised the culture of the Islamic world, so Bevilacqua writes, “as a
holistic set of religious, intellectual, and literary traditions deserving
respect and attention, and as an object of study that would yield intellectual,
aesthetic, and even moral enrichment in a variety of fields”.